The future is bright… but it will be a bumpy ride

Söderberg & Partners have brought together all their expertise in the UK platform arena, and their portfolio management experience of over 16 years in the Nordic market, and are partnering with IFA firms here in the UK. This will radically improve adviser efficiencies, accelerate growth and bring some of Sweden’s wisdom and success to advice firms looking to streamline their offering.

We spent some time with Söderberg CEO, Nick Raine, to talk about his vision for advice firms in the UK and find out what Söderberg have planned for the next five years and beyond.

So Nick, what are your thoughts about opportunities in the UK market, knowing how successful Söderberg has been in Sweden?

Well my first impression was that it wasn’t as saturated as we originally thought, and there is a lot of room for optimisation. In Sweden, you have four advisers to one paraplanner, and if you look at the systems that they've got, data flows more easily. So for us, efficiency is the answer and the goal. In the UK we've got every piece of technology under the sun, every piece of kit that can do anything you want it to do, but they don't talk to each other very well. It’s abundantly clear that efficiency is key.

How do we bring down the cost of advice? How do we drive efficiency? How do we move you from say 100 clients per advisor to 300 with no more people needing to come in, or how do you bring in another advisor into the business without needing to bring in another two or three paraplanners or administrators? That’s ultimately the end goal and the questions we address with our IFA firms when we partner with them.

Talk to us about your vision for Söderberg here in the UK, what drives you?

Well we would definitely like to be the fastest growing platform of course, and it’s critical to us that we’re the most tech-driven, so we expect to have very low numbers of feet on the ground to get the work done. We’ll also make some good decisions in terms of not being everything to everyone, and we’ll make sure that people are self-sufficient. You can’t force financial firms to adopt everything, you have to work at the pace they’re comfortable with, but enabling them access to all the tools they could need or use to get them into the fast lane, that’s the ideal.

Can you tell us your top three criteria for building your tech stack?

I’m going to give you four; we look for the technology we partner with to be API driven, heavy on integration, customisable and flexible and fully supported.

These are the main reasons we chose Seccl to partner with in terms of bringing the platform to market and the same reason we chose Plannr, to open the doors for integrations, at pace.

In the UK, a lot of people over the years have bastardised systems to make them work the way they want them to work. So you end up with ‘here's what our system should do, we've managed to kind of find a way for it to do this, but actually it's not fully supported’. And then things start to go wrong, or you have to put another manual process in place.

You need systems that are customisable enough and flexible enough to allow you to work the way you want to work, but then also open enough to be able to integrate into other places and not force you down the route that you know you might not want to go down.

Any future tech releases planned?

A frequent discussion we have is whether we build an app. You'd want the app to sit within the back-office software because then you can see if your clients have got an insurance policy or a mortgage, or they might have some assets on platform A and platform B and then you can see it all in one place. In which case why would you want an app for the platform? That's the benefit that we've got in terms of looking at the stack from cradle to grave, rather than just asking, "how do we drop you in a nice platform that works really well, but doesn't really fit in with everything else you do?"

We're also launching a new performance tool and that will link in with the platform. Stage two is then saying, "how do I pull that up into the back-office solution so I can pull all the data in and run my performance from one place?" We really want to get away from multiple logins for multiple advice tools, and move towards all your data in one location.

And what’s next for Soderberg?

So we’ve signed up multiple firms, between 20 and 30, and now the trick is to show the firms what we're building. You've got to envisage the cradle to grave piece, and then there's a lot of buy in.

Firms can see we're bringing in bits from Sweden and we're bringing in the best of breed from over here. We’ve got Plannr, we’ve got Seccl, and it’s now about showing that we’re building the best of breed platform that will help them improve efficiency, and with it profitability.

And longer term?

I think once it's in play and you can see it and you can feel it, I think it may drive two sets of acquisitions actually. We will invest anything up to 30% into a firm’s business. So it's their decision, everything's their decision and it's really important that it's their decision. If they don't want to pick everything in our tech stack, that's OK, they've got their reasons, but if you want to pick everything, then then we'll get you into the fast lane.

Last question. As the CEO of a growing platform business, what keeps you up at night?

That's a good question. There are many things that have kept me up previously. Once you get to a certain scale, you've got a lot of client data and if things go wrong, it can go drastically wrong. I think we're not at that stage yet, fortunately and unfortunately, so probably what keeps me up at night, more so at the minute, is how do we get the growth speed that we want to get to, and that's tricky.

Thanks for your time with us Nick!

Plannr is working alongside Söderberg and Seccl building deep two-way integrations that bring all your client data under one roof.

‘We envisage a time where advisers, paraplanners and support staff log in to Plannr at the start of their day and simply do not need to leave,’ said Gareth Thompson, CTO at Plannr. ‘The access to advice tools, meaningful engagement with your client, platform illustrations, research, suitability letters, ongoing servicing all from within your back-office CRM - as if it were all one and the same system, with data flowing freely between your entire tech-stack, is where we are heading.’

If you are interested in future-proofing your tech-stack and discovering how other advice firms are partnering with best-of-breed API-first tech firms, reach out for a demo of Plannr at www.plannrcrm.com/get-started/

Get in touch:

www.plannrcrm.com